28 September 2011 11:16 AM

Jacko: Why the continued hysterics?

Here is the news: Michael Jackson is still dead. I remember that, at the time of his death, my wife and I were on a few days’ break in Salisbury. Every time we returned to our hotel room and switched on the TV news, it was wall-to-wall Michael Jackson. Was there nothing else going on in the world, I thought?

Wars and rumours of wars, earthquakes in diverse places. I can just about bring myself to understand that there are people with such perverted aesthetic and musical taste that they might be misled by it to conclude that the extraordinary squeaky noises Jackson used to make (when he was alive) appealed to them as “music.” And of course prominent junkies such as Jackson are the international heroes of our debauched times.

But to arrive home yesterday after a long business meeting and to find that we still had wall-to-wall Jackson on TV – this time from a US courtroom – was frankly flabbergasting. Why the continued hysterical interest in this sordid saga, now two years past its sell-by date?

And the whole proceedings invested with a pompous, lugubrious, pseudo-religious intonation on the part of the participants – as if one were witnessing the good news of our damnation in some god-forsaken Calvinistic tin tabernacle…. I switched to the gardening programme.